Coreyonté Desmon: From Fitting the Mold to Radical Self-Acceptance

“You have to go,” the spirit of his late grandmother spoke over him as his body lay drained and depleted on the floor of his apartment while a pandemic ravaged the world and forest fires threatened the Oregon air he breathed. Coreyonté Desmon’s spirit was dying and no amount of determination or connection to a higher power was going to save him this time. He was four days into a contract as an apprentice dancer with Oregon Ballet Theatre in Portland, and all it took was one email with a resignation letter to set himself free and prepare to undergo an unknown path that would lead to a life of true vitality, love, and creative freedom.

I met Coreyonté during my first year in the dance department at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia. I was a sophomore in high school at the time and had been dancing for about 13 years. Coreyonté was a junior and had just begun dancing. He started his freshman year in GSA’s instrumental department playing the clarinet in addition to his academic classes at a different high school. It’s a lot for any teenager to handle, and by year two, he was taking uppers to get through his day and downers to fall asleep at night. This continued to carry him through his days until an allergic reaction forced him to come to a halt. While recuperating in the hospital, he started watching the AOL Original series city.ballet, a docudrama that followed the lives of ballet dancers with the New York City Ballet, one of the top professional dance companies in the world. He was inspired by Silas Farley and Craig Hall, Black male dancers at the top of their game. And from there Coreyonté was hooked.

Like many dancers in their late teens, Coreyonté’s dream was to get a contract with a professional ballet company anywhere in the country. His first year after graduating high school was spent in the highest level at Oregon Ballet Theatre’s academy. He may have couch surfed for a while and worked a full-time day job to afford his evening dance classes, but he described that year as the best year of his life. The rose-colored glasses were enough to keep him in a blissfully naïve state that first year.

He then spent two years in the second company, referred to as OBT2. He described his first year as a “world class opportunity,” as he was rehearsing with the main company and touring with the second company performing some of the most acclaimed choreography and learning from the greats. On stage, Coreyonté was living out his ultimate dream. Off stage, however, the rose-colored glasses had begun to slip from his face. For a free spirit such as Coreyonté, the pressure to look a certain way and conform to OBT’s easily digestible mold was uncomfortable to say the least. In his second year with the second company, he began working closely with OBT’s Artistic Director, an opportunity that looked promising but only made the mold more constricting. The director piled the pressure on him as the only tall Black man in the company. It wasn’t enough for him to just be a beautiful dancer. He was expected to be the one exceptional Black male dancer amongst a sea of white male dancers. As a Black man, he was frequently either romanticized or villainized depending on the mood of the company’s staff from day to day. He either had an “attitude” or was a “beautiful Black man.” He wasn’t allowed to fall between the cracks. The hyper fixation on race made anonymity impossible. And for a while, he put up with the racist comments and the Artistic Director’s sexual harassment. For a young dancer, our hunger for opportunities and recognition often clouds us to the nefarious intentions of those who set themselves up as “mentors” for us. Looking back, Coreyonté realizes the type of attention he was receiving was not okay. All he wanted was to impress the director so that he would get a main company contract at the end of the year, but it was to the detriment of his comfortability and safety, a story unfortunately the norm rather than the exception in the professional ballet world. And in the end, he got that main company contract. He would enter his fourth year in Portland as an apprentice dancer, but the damage had already been done.

It was during this tumultuous time that his dreams were reinforcing his late grandmother’s call for him to leave company life. His subconscious knew it was time to move on before his conscious mind was ready to commit to the decision. He told me one night he had a dream of himself dancing but at the same time holding a golden notebook and a golden pencil. In his own words, “I had a sense I was meant to do more than one thing,” meaning that his professional dance career couldn’t be his only calling in life. And as a self-proclaimed child of God, he knew that his gifts, including dance, needed to be nourished, and he couldn’t do that while confined to the ballet world’s mold for him.

The toxicity prevalent in the dance world is not new, but it is only in recent years that indiscretions are being brought to light. Within the past year, the public has learned of the manipulation and sexual assault of numerous young women by a former Boston Ballet dancer and her husband and over 50 cases within 50 years of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse by teachers against dance students at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts just to name a few of the worst recent scandals. When I asked Coreyonté about his outlook on the dance community, he said he has hope. He believes that people can change, and that is at the foundation of his hope. The prevailing toxic mentalities in the dance community are only so because they’ve been passed down through generations without critical thinking. Teachers need to see their students as gifts. “They think dancers work for companies, but companies should work for [dancers].” His hope for change in the dance world will never die, he can’t be the one to do it. He jokes, “I don’t even get paid enough to dance, why would I do community service for free!” He knows he can’t be the person he wants to be and remain in the dance world.

Now living in Richmond, Virginia only an hour and a half away from where we shared space at the ballet barre in high school, Coreyonté is learning to love himself outside of the molds and expectations society places on him as a queer Black man. His creativity was stifled in the rigidity of company life, but now with the freedom life affords him, he can explore all his creative gifts: dancing, singing, writing, and more. I asked him what inspires him now as a human being, and to that he said, “Personal power.” He wants to further tap into his power and help others tap into their power. He hasn’t completely ruled out a life as a dancer, but for now, he wants to “increase and grow.” He says, “And whatever comes with that, I’m accepting of it.” His metamorphization has only just begun.